Hearing deficiencies can range from partial hearing impairment to complete hearing loss. Often, an individual's hearing ability varies across the range of audible sound frequencies, and many individuals have hearing impairment with respect to only select acoustic frequencies. For example, an individual's hearing loss may be greater at higher frequencies than at lower frequencies.
A hearing health professional typically takes measurements using calibrated and specialized equipment to assess an individual's hearing capabilities in a variety of sound environments, and then adjusts the hearing aid based on the calibrated measurements. Subsequent adjustments to the hearing aid can require a second exam and further calibration by the hearing health professional, which can be costly and time intensive. In some instances, the hearing health professional may create multiple hearing profiles for the user for use in different sound environments.
However, merely providing stored hearing profiles to the user often leaves the user with a subpar hearing experience because each acoustic environment may vary in some way from the stored hearing aid profiles provided by the hearing health professional. Simply, storing more profiles on the hearing aid provides for better coverage of environmental systems but requires larger memories and increases the processing requirements in the hearing aid. Increased memory and enhanced processing increase the size requirements of the hearing aid that users want to be small and unobtrusive.
Some hearing aid systems allow the user to adjust their hearing aid after an initial programming by a hearing health professional by connecting the hearing aids to their personal computer (PC) and allowing the user to adjust the hearing aids while in use so that the user can hear the differences between each adjustment. However, while these hearing aid to PC systems allow for easier adjustments it is very difficult for a user to take into consideration acoustic environmental changes when adjusting a hearing aid because the home acoustic environment may be externally different form the intended use acoustic environment.
In the following description, the use of the same reference numerals in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.